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kill me.
(i will not die.)
—Kenzie Hampton, salem.
2006
“I’m not the same person anymore. That night at Lee’s—if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“Even though you killed someone?”
“I guess that’s it then.”
Elle doesn’t look back as she leaves Hotch’s office.
She doesn’t look back when she leaves the FBI, DC, her apartment in Columbia Heights, not even when she leaves the country.
The sky outside her plane window is pearlescent under the morning sun, the Atlantic Ocean a mirror under tufts of clouds. What is there to miss anyway? Not her family, not the job she’s thrown away, not the violence that seems to follow her everywhere. She’s all alone in the world, back from death itself, and nothing can touch her now.
2012
Clyde is waiting for her at the baggage claim carousel. He wants to go in for a hug, but Emily rebuffs him, hand awkwardly on his shoulder, her other held out for a weak handshake. She didn’t ask him to come, but of course he’s here. They’ve always been like this, entangled, borders and oceans and other people between them, but finding each other again.
He thought she was dead too, she remembers, but they’re in the car and he’s watching her through the rearview mirror when he suddenly smiles, “I knew you were out there still kicking, Emily Prentiss.”
Clyde says it like it’s a good thing. Emily’s not so sure it is.
Emily recognizes her in the bullpen immediately. Her hair’s longer than in the photos she’s seen. She looks happier too. Emily knows Elle left the Unit on bad terms, but not much else. She’s seen the photo on Reid’s desk. Gideon is in it too.
She feels an unexpected kinship with her. Two BAU drop-outs, both just trying to run from the past.
“And how is Hotch?” Elle doesn’t mean for it to sound like she’s prying, but the look on Emily’s face, first tender, then hard, tells her that he was more than just a boss to her.
“They miss you, you know,” Emily deflects, finishing off her drink in a single swig.
Elle side-eyes her. No, they don’t. After what happened to her? After what she did? There were some things that couldn’t be forgiven.
“Why did you leave?” Elle wonders out loud. Emily seems much more stable, more capable of dealing with the things they saw every day.
Emily gazes out the pub window, a thousand-yard stare like she’s remembering something she would rather forget. “You know how sometimes things happen, and—and you just can’t come back from that and be the same person?”
Elle looks at her. Really looks for the first time. This woman who should be a stranger but instead seems to know all the ghosts that haunt her, the memories that she can’t let go of.
“Yeah, I know,” she replies, suddenly cold. “Do you miss it, who you were? Before?”
Emily smiles. Elle feels Emily’s warm hand around hers.
Maybe it’s not the remembering that hurts.
If Emily thought Interpol would be less of whatever the FBI was, then she’s sorely mistaken. Some more paper pushing, some more office space, but the rest is still death and dying. Still the worst things human beings are capable of doing to one another.
She’s out in the field one day, the unbearable stench of acetone peroxide and blood putting her on the verge of passing out. An explosion outside of a school. Technically foiled because the package was meant to be delivered indoors. Except two girls are still dead. Running late, they were caught in the blast by the school gate.
She makes her way over to the makeshift polytarp tent where a few local police are smoking. Elle is there too. She’s studying a piece of shrapnel under a magnifying glass, turning it over and over.
She gestures to Emily. “See this?” she points at a barely perceptible engraving in the metal. It looks like a letter. “Part of a serial number. A razor, probably.”
Emily nods. She can only think about shrapnel piercing flesh. Dead children. Elle doesn’t seem to notice.
“I’ve seen this before. The one on the bus from a few years ago, I think. They used nails and razors. But I’ll need more debris,” she contemplates, rubbing the razor fragment between her gloved fingers.
“Yeah, yeah,” Emily replies, far away. “I’ll get you a tech. Also, they might be able to find more in the bodies.”
Elle finally sees that resigned, awful look in Emily’s eyes. She understands.
There’s always the new dead. Always another real horror in the real world.
“I think to myself ‘it’s over, it’s the last one,’ and then it’s not,” Emily mumbles into her glass.
When Elle kisses her it’s like she’s known her all her life.
She tastes faintly of strawberries, sweet, but there’s a sadness too, salty, like she’s been crying.
“I didn’t mean for this—“ Elle murmurs into Emily’s jaw.
Whatever was supposed to happen, now it’s the two of them, mouths and hands on each other in a grimy pub booth.
Emily wants to tell her to stop talking, but instead she pulls away, sees Elle’s pupil’s blown wide, lips flushed dark coral, and she wants her again.
“This can’t happen,” she says, except it comes out sounding like a question, like a plea for Elle to say yes, it can. They just stare at each other, breathless, wishing and waiting.
Elle can feel his fingers inside the gunshot wound. Randall Garner’s fingers pressing into the bullet hole, on the torn, fresh flesh. She can taste iron in her mouth. Vomit too.
She can see William Lee’s sick smile, his gloating voice, feel his hot breath on her face as he taunts her. Those poor girls he raped.
They’re all the same, these men who want to hurt her.
The blowback of her gun, that moment of fear, his body on the pavement.
She keeps telling herself she’s untouchable.
The scar twinges, his fingers inside her, twisting, twisting, twisting.
Emily unbuttons Elle’s shirt slowly, almost reverently, and the air is cool against her skin.
When she finally gets to it, the scar below Elle’s left rib, she pauses, the gentlest breath, her fingers skimming over the raised tissue.
“Gunshot?” Emily whispers knowingly.
“Yeah,” she replies, in equal measures surprised that Emily isn’t disgusted, and disgusted in herself for thinking she would be.
Emily doesn’t tell her she has a similar scar. Elle will find out soon enough anyway, but she can feel it throb under her clothes.
The two of them, so much alike, and still so many unspeakable things between them, a violence beyond words.
How many times she wished she could forget, but it lives in her body now, not just the pain, but the fear too, wishing it would just end, and then still alive, even when she didn’t want to be.
She has to keep telling herself that. That she’s alive, and it’s a good thing, and Ian Doyle is gone, and the surgeons fished all those splintered bits of wood out of her body, out of the gash in her gut, and put her back together again.
Who knew all the wounds could heal and it would still feel like bleeding.
Emily calls Tom Koehler on Declan’s birthday. She was planning to make it back stateside to see them, but the investigation into the school bombing is ramping up. Just like all of his birthdays before this one. Always another case, another serial killer.
She’s worried about what Louise and his father’s deaths have done to him. She knows what it’s like to feel alone in the world.
Tom tries to reassure her. Children are resilient. She should know that too. He passes the phone to Declan.
“Emily?” his voice makes her heart swell. He’s the one good thing in her life.
“Hey, kid,” she answers, and for a moment, it’s like nothing’s changed, and the past never happened.
Ian has Emily’s shoulders up against the headboard, straddling her, his forearm on her throat, his face dark, expressionless, just the cruelest hint of a smirk as she starts gasping for air, clawing at his hand.
“No one else can have you, Lauren,” Ian laughs.
Lauren, Lauren, Lauren.
Emily remembers her.
The sky is so clear the stars seem close enough to pluck out of the heavens.
Elle rests her head on Emily’s shoulder and dangles her feet off the balcony. She reaches for a cig, but Emily runs her hand up her leg, from her knee up and under her running shorts. Elle gasps. It comes out sounding closer to a whimper.
“What was it like,” Emily whispers against Elle’s hairline, “when you got shot?”
Elle startles at the question. She can’t believe Emily would want to hurt her like this.
"How can you—"
“I know what you did to William Lee.”
“You read my file?”
It’s like a punch to the gut. Even Emily, this one person she found solace with, condemning her for something she can never come to regret. But instead, Emily untangles her legs from Elle’s and turns to look her square in the face. Her eyelashes are wet.
“There was someone too.” Emily pauses for a breath. “That man who attacked me, he wasn’t just a mobster—I lived with him, and I was there when he died.”
Elle doesn’t really understand yet, but she now knows why, from the moment they met, she’s had the strangest feeling that they’re bound by something.
Of course it has to be this horrible connection. That they both have violence in their bones, blood on their hands. How stupid she was to think that Garner could shoot her and spread her insides over the walls of her home and that would just be the end. How stupid Emily was to think that she could sleep with a terrorist every night and raise his son, and come out the other side unscathed.
“You were undercover on him. The man who did this to you.”
Emily nods almost imperceptibly.
Elle reaches out to grope for Emily and finds her blouse. She runs her fingers over the place where Emily’s scar is under. The lightest flutter. So she doesn’t hurt her.
Is this trust or danger?
Emily kisses Elle so hard their teeth scrape and lips chafe.
“I don’t want to do it like this,” Elle moans, but she’s already down to her underwear, wet and ready.
“Shut up,” Emily bites back cruelly.
Elle hears the beeping of a heart monitor for a split second. The smell of antiseptic. The jolt of electricity that brought her back.
“Did you code? In the ambulance, I mean. Or the hospital?” Elle blurts out.
Why can’t they stop talking about this? Isn’t forgetting what they want?
Emily stops. Lips on her throat.
“I try not to, you know?”
Try not to think about it? Try not to relive it? Everything, her whole life is back to this. Back to what Doyle did to her, and most of all what she did to him. She was so ruthless, still so young, willing to do anything for her team and her ideals. She remembers the bloody whiskey taste of his mouth.
Who knew that underneath the water it was all murky, survival and violence wrapped into one, the stink of death a second skin?
“We have to try, Elle,” Emily pleads. But even she’s not so sure if she believes herself.
If this is what healing feels like, then maybe she would rather wallow in the wound.
Elle tells Emily she’s going to New York to visit family for Christmas.
But she goes to Dayton instead.
She visits William Lee’s grave.
She looks down at his pauper’s plot and tries to feel something, guilt, remorse, anything. But all she can think of are his victims, their fear, their rage, and how what he did would stay with them their entire lives.
Elle’s glad she killed him.
And Randall Garner?
He’s not even worth a second thought, let alone a plane ticket.
John Cooley calls Emily three hours into the new year.
At first she thinks he’s drunk, but he’s just his usual harried yet charismatic self.
“Happy New Year. I miss you, Em.” He sounds like he really means it.
And then, the part she always dreads, “I think about Italy all the time, what I should have done. I’m so sorry.”
Except this year, she’s not sure why, maybe’s it’s that scar on her stomach, or the coming close to death, that makes her soft in a strange way.
“John, I think about it too, about everything, all the time. But I leave it there. In the past.”
Maybe not all of it is that easy, but she thinks of Elle, of her kind eyes, and she’s sure that some things are that simple, if she can just will them to be.
They touch each other like it’s been years. Even though the holiday was only two weeks.
“It’s going to be all right now,” Elle says as she’s undressing Emily, always so talkative, even during sex.
Emily doesn’t bother to respond, just tangles her fingers through Elle’s hair and brings her forward for another searing kiss.
“What happened in Ohio?”
“How did you know?”
“I saw the stamp in your passport.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, I want to.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
Emily opens her eyes. Spring is around the corner.
Elle’s body is warm against hers.
She feels herself thawing.
“Did you have a nightmare?” Elle murmurs, bleary-eyed.
It’s early morning, no light outside yet. It felt so real, Ian kissing her, Clyde wrapping her in a blanket, Declan crying.
It’s not a bad memory.
She can still smell the freesias, the earth after the thunderstorm that day.
She turns to Elle and brushes some stray hair out of her face.
“It’s okay,” Emily reassures. She turns off the bedside lamp as Elle sinks back under the sheets.
They’re shrouded in darkness again.
“Go back to sleep.”